Reckless Love
Love Never Dies, prt. 13
Wildwind Community Church
David Flowers
July 4, 2010
This series we have been in for the past few months is called Love Never Dies. We started it on Easter Sunday – now that seems like forever ago, doesn’t it?! That day we covered the death and resurrection of Jesus. Then we went back to John chapter 1 and started working through a chapter a week. I’ve discovered something in this huge undertaking, which is that what I’m doing is impossible. There’s just too much in most chapters to give it any kind of adequate coverage – even to give you a reasonable overview. So I have instead focused on part of each chapter – maybe half of it, or a quarter of it, or one scene in the chapter, or even just a few verses. And I’m going to build today’s sermon around just two words. Let me read the text for you.
John 12:20-25 (MSG)
20 There were some Greeks in town who had come up to worship at the Feast.
21 They approached Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee: "Sir, we want to see Jesus. Can you help us?"
22 Philip went and told Andrew. Andrew and Philip together told Jesus.
23 Jesus answered, "Time's up. The time has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
24 "Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over.
25 In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you'll have it forever, real and eternal.
You know what two words I’ve picked today that I want us to focus on? Reckless love. That is your calling and mine.
My friends, this world – and perhaps especially the religious world – is on a mission to draw borders and boundaries around love. I have a hypothetical question for you. Have you ever experienced what you recognized was unconditional love? Have you ever had someone say I love you, or show you they loved you, and you just knew that what they were really saying was “I love you infinity. I love you with my whole mind and heart and soul and strength. I am committed to you. I love you with my life, and no matter what you say, no matter what you do, no matter how far you may roam, no matter how long I might have to wait for you to love me in return, no matter how much pain loving you might cause me, I love you. I love you with a love that is beyond measure. Love that is irrational, unreasonable, and inextinguishable. I love you to the moon and back, against all odds, for reasons not always fully known to me, beyond the reach of words to describe it, and beyond the short length of my own life and yours." Have you experienced that kind of love? Has someone assured you that they love you so deeply that you are completely safe, completely beyond all possibility of the loss of their love, completely secure, endlessly valued, treasured, esteemed, and desired, and sought after and fawned over and protected. Do you know what it is like to be the apple of somebody’s eye? I try not to tell them this too much, but the reality is that there are three teenage girls in this world who own me. I don’t know any other way to say it. They own me. They are the apple of my eye – the center of my world. I have said before and I’ll say it again – my love for them is not heroic, in fact it’s just the opposite. We think of heroism and we think of great effort. But I love my girls without the slightest effort at all. Even on my worst day, in the lowest times of my life, I love them easily. Even when I am irritable, I nearly always find myself prone to still respond to them gently. They occupy a place in my life that no one else even comes close to – parents, that’s how we love our kids, isn’t it?
My friend, that is how God loves you. The fact is that you are the apple of someone’s eye. You are the object of fanatical devotion and endless fascination. You bring joy to the heart of God that you can only understand by reflecting on the joy that your kids bring to your heart. It’s extremely difficult for us to get our arms around. Even as I easily recognize this love I have for my own children, I have to remind myself that this is the same love my parents have for me. That’s hard to understand. And it’s hard to understand with God.
A thousand times a day I say to my girls, “I love you.” And they reply to me, “I love you too.” And they do. But they don’t understand. They can’t understand. The love I have for them is a love they will simply have to experience one day for their own children and then they will realize – wow, that’s the way mom and dad love us. A thousand times a day God tells us he loves us – in his Word, the Bible, but also in nature, in blessings we receive from him, in friendships – we live every day in the center of love so immense that it is just unfathomable. And because we so often do not fathom God’s love, we often live almost entirely outside the awareness that we are objects of this great love, that comes endlessly to us from God like great waves crashing on the beach that roll in, and roll in, and roll in, and roll in, and never ever ever stop. And because we so often live outside the awareness of God’s love, therefore we often live as if we in fact are not loved. See, only when we live outside the awareness of God’s love do we ever for one minute think we have to earn it, or that we ever could earn it. From what we know about the way we love our kids, that’s plainly ridiculous and untrue. Only when we live outside the awareness of God’s love do we ever think for a moment that someone else is less than fully loved by God. Only when we live outside the awareness of God’s love do we live in loneliness and isolation from one another. Only when we live outside the awareness of God’s love do we find it hard to forgive ourselves and one another. After all, we quite quickly and easily forgive our own children, do we not? Yet we think we have to extract God’s forgiveness with penances and good deeds. How foolish we are!
Reckless love. I think this teaching we’re looking at today may well be one of the most profound and important things Jesus – the Logos – the Love that Never Dies – ever gave us. That’s probably why he started it with:
John 12:24-25 (MSG)
24 "Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over.
25 In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you'll have it forever, real and eternal.
Love is only realized as we lose ourselves in the one we love. When a person loves in a self-conscious way then he or she is, at least in part, seeking his/her own benefit in the love relationship. What can I get out of this? How can I get mine? Since I love this much, I at least have a right to expect that you will love that much. But that kind of love is not really love – it is self-interest. We are partially seeking to have our own needs met.
Go back to the love we have for your children. Why do we love them so much? Our love for our children is intense to the same extent to which it is selfless. I’m here for you. I protect you. I nurture you. I sacrifice for you. I lay it all down for you. I acted first, bringing life to you, and every act of mine toward you sustains and broadens and furthers and deepens that love because with every step, every word, and every thought I live to see you surrounded by love, established in perpetual peace and happiness. I wish nothing for you but good things. I cannot wish anything less. When you suffer, I pray that I could take on your pain so that you might go free. We love our children selflessly (parents who cannot or do not are broken people and need help).
But here’s the irony. We love our children selflessly precisely because they carry us in them. The more we pour love out onto them, the happier we are able to help them be, the happier we find ourselves becoming as well. Our whole delight and joy is to assure their contentment, peace, and prosperity – to do everything we can to help them make their way in this world. We pour out and pour out and pour out and pour out and on graduation day when they throw their hats up and start a new stage of their journey, we’re just getting started on loving them. Like I recently wrote in my blog, it has been said that to have a child is to have your heart walking around outside of your body.
You, my friend, are the heart of God, walking around outside of him. You express his hope, his longings, his aspirations. He delights in you. God loves you selflessly because you carry God in you as his child. God’s love for you is intense because it is utterly selfless. God is in a very real sense, lost in you. And since God made you in his image, then as God loves you, God loves himself, and finds himself in you. Now as you learn to increasingly love God back in this way, learn to lose yourself in God, you start to achieve what the mystic saints call union. See, as God loves you, he loves himself in you. And as you love God, you love yourself in God because God is in you and you are in God. That is union – realizing that only as we lose ourselves in love – only as we utterly pour ourselves out, forget about ourselves, die to ourselves – only as we lose ourselves in love do we experience love in return. Most people are begging desperately, “Love me, love me, love me, please love me,” but they are broken. They don’t follow the rules that determine how love works. We can’t insist on love, or demand it. What we can do is lose ourselves in love for the other, and when we do that we will see the image of God in them, and we will realize that we are loving God in them, and we will experience the love of God in return as we pour ourselves out. This sounds mystical and in a way it is, but we can understand it as we keep thinking about our children. We don’t have to demand that our children love us. We just bring them into the world and love the daylights out of them, pay whatever price love requires, and we find that in securing their well-being and peace and happiness, we are securing our own.
This love stuff? That’s what it’s all about. But most of the world and most of religion is on a mission to draw borders and boundaries around love. We do that out of fear, which itself comes from lack of love. We fear that if we let someone know they are loved without condition, they’ll use our love to exploit us, or as an excuse to keep living in destructive ways, or maybe just ways we don’t agree with. We’re afraid that in loving someone without limits, we’ll communicate tacit approval of their bad behaviors. So instead we think it’s better to love a little, and then try to figure out how to be just the right amount judgmental, to get the results we want. A few months ago someone said some extremely painful things to me, and then later apologized for not speaking in love, and then of course repeated the same hurtful words all over again because he really believed his condemnations were for my own good. You know how I replied? I said, “Instead of trying to figure out how to say judgmental and hurtful things in loving ways, why not just choose to say loving things and leave it at that?” Then of course I got the speech about how sometimes Jesus had to say harsh things and so we will too. I let it go, but what I wanted to say was simply, “We’re not Jesus. We can’t say the things he said in the spirit in which he said them. If we think we can, that’s a huge problem.”
John 12:24 (MSG)
24 "Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over.
Most of us don’t love well, and we don’t love well because we want to stay above ground. We want to avoid (project SELF picture) this. We want to still keep control over everything. We want to determine how much respect we deserve and then secure that respect for ourselves, and most of us will do that at any cost. We want to make sure that in loving people, we don’t somehow empower them to keep doing things we don’t like. We want to love just enough to secure the comfort and security of love for ourselves but – with most people other than our kids – we’ll pull back before the price gets too high. And here’s where we have to understand the power of what Jesus says. A grain of wheat, unless it is buried, will never be more than a grain of wheat. It’ll always remain a seed. Wheat potential, rather than wheat actualized! Until we are ready to die, ready to give up ego, ready to learn selfless love for God, others, and even ourselves (ironic, I know, but completely possible), then we’re love potential, but not love actualized. We’re love POTENTIAL, but not love ACTUALIZED. The wheat seed was made to be a stalk of wheat. You were made to live fully in love. The wheat seed will never be a stalk until the seed dies. You will never live fully in love unless you, too get in the ground and lose yourself in love the way God has lost himself in you.
John 12:25 (MSG)
25 In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you'll have it forever, real and eternal.
Do you see this? Anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. This is a big problem, folks, because holding on to life as it is is almost a full-time occupation for many of us. We’re trying to keep a hold on life . We’re trying to make sure we get love for ourselves. We’re worried about who’s loving us and who’s not. Many of us think we’ll be more loving if only so and so will love us more or deeper or better. But that’s all about us, and clinging to ourselves is the best way to devour and destroy ourselves. Learning to let go – that’s what it’s all about. You know why?
Because God is in everyone. That’s Biblical. God breathed into us the breath of life. Everyone who is alive is here because God’s life, God’s breath, is in them. When I let go of myself and decide to learn to love another person selflessly, I am loving the image of God in that person. Jesus said this:
Matthew 25:37-40 (NIV)
37 "Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?
38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?
39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'
40 "The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'
Whatever we do for others, we are doing for God. If we think this is simply a metaphor, we miss the mystery. This is real! God is actually in that person you can’t stand. God is actually dwelling in that person who continually hurts your feelings. God is actually present in that person who considers you an enemy.
Many Christians are sincere in their desires and attempts to love people who are difficult to love, to become better love-ers. But many are doing it without dying. Many won’t lay down. Many won’t get themselves out of the way so they can stop measuring their love, stop thinking other people ought to be grateful for it, stop thinking, “I’ve loved enough – when do I get to be loved back,” give up all the ways in which we love conditionally because ultimately we’re loving above ground . We haven’t died yet. For most of us, love is still ultimately about us.
But it’s not. Loving our kids isn’t about us, and rather than looking at our love for our kids as some special thing we can’t find anywhere else in the world, why not realize that the way we love our kids is pretty similar to the way God loves us, and pretty similar to what Jesus is asking of us when he tells us to love others? We already have a model – not only Jesus, but the way we love our own children. We see that most of us are definitely capable of love on very deep levels. The challenge for us to is to learn to love ourselves and others with a love similar to how we love our kids. Now we’re never gonna get there in this lifetime. You have a bond with your kids you’re never gonna have with anyone else, and that’s okay – but it’s what we aspire to.
And because we aspire to that love, we live in a different way. And because we live in a different way, Wildwind Church continues to be an amazing and unique place – a place where we are truly learning to die to ourselves, to get in the ground, to let God’s love within us out of this husk that is our self interest and ego and bust out and take on a life of its own! The love of God is reckless love. God loves us recklessly, all of us. And because God loves us recklessly, he wants what every parent wants: for his children to love each other. Only when we love in this way, like God does, will we find love that never dies.
